Margaret Fuller's First Depiction of Indians and the Limits on Social Protest: An Exercise in Women's Studies Pedagogy

Abstract

By July 1842 Margaret Fuller had handed over editorship of the Transcendental Club's journal, the Dial, to her successor Ralph Waldo Emerson. Earlier that year, the two had arranged for Fuller to review two collections of folk ballads, both published in Germany but readily available in the United States. 1 In early June, Fuller promised Emerson "50 or 60" pages in time for publication in the October issue (Emerson, Letters 62). The two books to be reviewed were Rheinsagen aus dem Munde des Volks und deutscher Dichter. Für Schule, Haus und Wandershaft (1837) [Traditions of the Rhine from the Mouths of the People and German Poets. For School, Home, and Travelling], which Fuller translated simply as "Traditions of the Rhine from the mouths of the people and German poets. By Karl Simrock"; and Neugriechische Volkslieder, gesammelt und herausgegeben von C. Fauriel (1825), which Fuller translated as "Modern Greek popular Songs, collected and published by C. Fauriel" (Fuller, "Romaic" 137, 153). This second volume, she made clear, had been translated by Wilhelm Müller into German from its original French and was "furnished both with the French editor's explanations and . . . [with Müller's] own" (Fuller, "Romaic" 153-54). 2